{"id":4795,"date":"2012-09-10T07:48:24","date_gmt":"2012-09-10T13:48:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4795"},"modified":"2012-09-10T07:48:24","modified_gmt":"2012-09-10T13:48:24","slug":"black-swan-farming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4795","title":{"rendered":"Black Swan Farming"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/paulgraham.com\/swan.html\">Paul Graham<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><I>I&#8217;ve done several types of work over the years but I don&#8217;t know another as counterintuitive as startup investing.<\/p>\n<p>The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas.<\/p>\n<p>The first rule I knew intellectually, but didn&#8217;t really grasp till it happened to us. The total value of the companies we&#8217;ve funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it.<\/p>\n<p>In startups, the big winners are big to a degree that violates our expectations about variation. I don&#8217;t know whether these expectations are innate or learned, but whatever the cause, we are just not prepared for the 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paul Graham: I&#8217;ve done several types of work over the years but I don&#8217;t know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4795"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}